The Lens is an academic search engine that gathers patents and academic documents , such as articles, communications, books and theses, in a unified and separate system at the same time, since each type of document has its place on the results page.

It stands out for offering innovative solutions with which it is able to identify the intersections between the two types of documents indicated. It is also innovative in the design solutions of its interface for the search and presentation of results.

It also stands out for its resolute orientation towards open science . which expresses strongly with statements such as the following:

The Lens serves global patent and scholarly knowledge as a public good to inform science and technology-enabled problem solving.

It also defines itself as a global infrastructure to achieve a more efficient , fair , transparent and inclusive innovation system. We must say that it seems to us one of the most attractive definitions of vision / mission that we have found in this field.

The point is that in the team of The Lens have some brilliant minds in the definition of objectives, if not, see the slogan that appears under your name on the website:

Solving the problem of problem solving

To complete the presentation of this search engine, let's return to the About Us page from which we can obtain this statement (the highlights are ours):

The Lens is building an open platform for Innovation Cartography . Specifically, the Lens serves nearly all of the patent documents in the world as open, annotatable digital public goods that are integrated with scholarly and technical literature along with regulatory and business data. The Lens will allow document collections, aggregations, and analyzes to be shared, annotated, and embedded to open the mapping of the world of knowledge-directed innovation. Ultimately, this will restore the role of the patent system as a teaching resource to inspire and inform entrepreneurs, citizens and policy makers.

Within the next two years, we expect to host over 95% of the world's patent information and link to most of the scholarly literature, creating open public innovation portfolios of individuals and institutions. Using all open source components, we are working to create open schemas by which patent documents can be used to teach and communicate, rather than confuse and intimidate .

Finally, to complete the characterization of The Lens , we will take advantage of the following screenshot of its website in which they present their three most characteristic aspects:

The three main characteristic of The Lens.
Three extremely important characteristics of the work philosophy of The Lens: Free (without charges), Open (without restrictions and Secure (no follow-ups).